Increasingly, businesspersons and students are becoming more mobile. Business meetings are being conducted offsite--away from the person's regular place of business. Students often attend lectures and classes away from their regular routine classrooms. At these business meetings and lectures, and while traveling, these businesspersons and students have a definite need for a case for neatly carrying all of the papers and other items that they must carry with them. The carrying case must be capable of maintaining the papers in an organized fashion in a such a manner that the papers are easily accessible to the user in the manner selected by the user. Further, the carrying case should be lightweight, easy to carry, and have sufficient pockets and space to hold additional materials, such as pens, pencils, calculators, business cards and the like.
Although one main purpose of such a case is to carry papers and other items, the businessperson or student will often also use the case to carry a fresh pad of paper on which to write information. There are carrying cases in existence which are capable of carrying papers in an organized fashion and which have space to carry a fresh notepad of paper and other items, such as pens, etc.
These carrying cases, however, have one significant drawback--the only place within the carrying case to carry the fresh pad of paper is within the central interior of the carrying case, together with the other papers and materials, which are also contained within the interior of the carrying case. Thus, in these existing carrying cases, if the user of the carrying case wishes to write something onto a fresh piece of paper contained on a notepad within the carrying case, the user will have to open the interior of the carrying case, thereby exposing the papers and other materials contained therein. By opening the interior of the carrying case, the user runs the risk of having the papers contained within the interior of the carrying case fall out of the case, even when the user simply wants to write something down on the notepad.
Further, the writing surfaces of many desks, usually those used in a school or lecture hall, are only large enough to hold a single sheet of paper; they are not large enough to hold both sides of the carrying case when it is opened to expose the interior of the case where the user will be writing on the notepad contained inside. Thus, the user must accommodate these smaller desks while writing on the notepad contained inside the case by folding the case behind on itself, or allowing one side of the case to fall over the edge of the desk. Using these carrying cases on such smaller desks thus exposes the papers and other items contained within the case to the additional risk that the papers and other items contained within the case will fall out of the case.
Accordingly, it will be appreciated from the foregoing that there is a definite need for an improved carrying case which is capable of storing a pad of fresh writing paper, wherein the notepad may be stored in a pocket that will enclose the notepad and protect it from the outside elements. The notepad should be easily accessible to the user, without disturbing the other papers and materials maintained within the carrying case. In other words, the user should be able to write upon the fresh pad of paper without having to open the case to expose the papers contained within the interior of the case. Further, the carrying case should be sturdy enough so that the user can have a sufficiently stable surface to write upon the notepad when it is exposed from its pocket. The present invention meets these needs.